Analytical Advertising
William A. Shryer, who ran a Detroit correspondence school called the American Collection Service, sets out to test the trade's belief in 'cumulative value': that repeating an ad in the same publication makes it pull better over time.
What it is
William A. Shryer, who ran a Detroit correspondence school called the American Collection Service, sets out to test the trade's belief in 'cumulative value': that repeating an ad in the same publication makes it pull better over time. The first part applies laboratory psychology to advertising, in chapters on sensation and Weber's law, attention, association, suggestion, reason, instinct and habit, emotion and imagination. The rest prints keyed records: every consecutive run of his own ads since a classified in System magazine in August 1907; a four-year table for some 150 publications with inquiries, cash returns, cost and a profit or loss verdict; Professor Beery's horsemanship school; results by size from five-line classifieds (13,374 inquiries at about 30 cents each) to full pages; and the $10,000 Des Moines city campaign in World's Work and the Saturday Evening Post. His finding: the first insertions pull most, later ones less.
Why read it now
The method is the part that lasts: key every ad, record inquiries, sales and cost by medium, publish the losses, and refuse a seller's claim that comes without figures. That is the discipline behind direct response, holdout tests and marketing mix models today. His core finding also holds for response ads: the same copy in the same medium wears out, and later insertions return less, which later research on wear-out and diminishing returns to frequency supports. He goes too far in calling all cumulative effect a superstition. He measured only keyed inquiries over months, and later work, from Binet and Field's analyses of IPA cases to Ehrenberg-Bass research on memory, finds that brand advertising builds effects that show up in unkeyed sales over years, which his tables could not see. The psychology chapters have dated and add little to the tables. One detail from Des Moines still teaches: the two ads that pulled best spoke personally, to 'the young man' and his parents. Use it this way: key every ad, compare the first two insertions with the last two, and retire copy when cost per lead climbs.
Passages worth keeping
any attack of mine is not against the principle of cumulative value, but against its appropriation by the publisher
لا ينكر شراير أن النشاط التجاري الجيد ينمو تراكميًا، بل ينكر أن ينسب الناشر هذا النمو إلى تكرار الإعلان في مطبوعته.
Were there any such thing as cumulative value, the results in actual inquiries from repeated insertions of any copy in the same mediums would constantly increase in number from month to month.
لو كان للتكرار قيمة تراكمية حقيقية لزادت الاستفسارات شهرًا بعد شهر، لكن سجلاته تُظهر العكس.
Next to one's self, nothing is so near or personal as your boy.
أنجح إعلانات دي موين خاطبت الآباء عن أبنائهم، لأن الإنسان لا يهتم بشيء بعد نفسه كما يهتم بولده.
It is the shame of a good many agencies that they do not insist on records being kept by the advertiser.
يعيب شراير على كثير من الوكالات أنها لا تلزم عملاءها بتسجيل نتائج إعلاناتهم.
The good advertiser is not the one who guesses, but rather the one who proves.
المعلن الجيد لا يعتمد على التخمين، بل يختبر ويثبت بالأرقام.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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